FILM REVIEW

‘Frances Ha’

3 ½ stars (out of 4)

MPAA Rating: R for sexual references and language

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Michael Esper, Adam Driver

Director: Noah Baumbach

Run time: 86 minutes

The laugh in the title “Frances Ha” is an uncomfortable one. Played by indie princess Greta Gerwig, Frances is a character on the cusp of reluctant self-awareness. She’s a graceless would-be ballet dancer doing a klutzy jete on the ragged edge of unemployment and homelessness. Faced with inevitable but unwelcome change, she chooses to regress.

Gerwig, co-writing the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach, has created a fascinating character. She’s 27, awkward, scattered and immature. She’s annoying but endearing, hyper but lazy. Baumbach’s past directorial efforts – “Greenberg,” “Margot at the Wedding,” “The Squid and the Whale” – were bitterly funny and thematically similar. But Gerwig’s amicable presence and sad smile gives “Frances Ha” a warmer, softer, more welcoming edge to his style of neurotic-character study, shot sumptuously and suggestively in black-and-white.

The film’s opening scenes find Frances splitting with her boyfriend and her closest friend and roommate, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), moving out. Sophie’s departure breaks their co-dependent attachment, and Frances sees it as a betrayal. Set adrift, she stuffs her belongings in a storage locker and bounces from a friend’s apartment to a co-worker’s couch to a dorm at her college alma mater. She’s an apprentice for a dance company, and her kind supervisor tries to give hints that Frances doesn’t have the skill or commitment to progress as a dancer. But she doesn’t get it.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s script is astute and insightful. Frances says things fraught with darkly comic subtext, and work both in and out of context to define her character: “This hasn’t been great for a while.” “I look like I’m asking a question.” “I’m not a real person yet.” “I have trouble leaving places.” Her friends endure her and lover her. One of her temporary roommates half-jokingly dubs her “undateable,” and we cringe and laugh because it’s true. We don’t want it to be, because Gerwig’s performance is so endearing and tinged with melancholy.

Two dinner-party sequences are key. One puts Frances among fellow unattached singles, one of whom says she has “an older face, but, like, you act younger.” The other finds her in the company of the moneyed and/or married – lawyers, mothers and owners of Parisian apartments - and she’s like a drunk 15-year-old at the adults’ table at Thanksgiving. If she can’t be comfortable in her own skin, she can’t fit into any social stratus. The film is essentially about coming to grips with unrealized dreams, but there’s a thin line between comedy and tragedy, and Gerwig walks it remarkably well.